Profiles

Profiles are a way of grouping a set options together, and reuse them across your portal. A profile consists of:

name and description that help you uniquely identify profiles

list of items that represent which items are displayed under current profile; these items are tabs from your portal that you drag and drop to build you own hierarchy

permissions that specify the audience of your profile; NavXp will check the profiles in the order they appear in Instance Appearance and will stop at the first profile that matches permissions for current user

Note that this is subject to change in future versions. We are planning that profile items are not necessary tabs on your profiles, they could be arbitrary links for example. For permissions, we're planning to add more advanced techniques such as matching two roles in the same time, excluding roles and users and so on.

Default Profile

There is a special profile in your NavXp installation that is created automatically and can't be deleted. This is called default profile. We made it a top priority NavXp is really easy to use, that's why we designed this profile to mimic the behavior of the DNN menus, that is built based on the tab hierarchy, the Display in Menufeature and roles.

The NavXp default profile has the following properties:

it renders items as they are defined in the tab hierarchy of the portal

tabs that have Display in Menu option set are not rendered

permissions are set to All Users - this means that all users will see the menu

permissions are filtered by tab permissions, so if the user doesn't have rights to see a tab he won't see it in NavXp neither

Creating a New Profile

To create a new profile open up NavXp configuration screen. In the first tab, locate the Create New Profile link and click it. This will open Add/Edit Profile screen. Give your profile a meaningful name and a description, then navigate to the second tab where we define the custom hierarchy we want to display. At this point, you should see two trees: one that displays all the pages on your portal, and another one that is empty which represents the pages that currently form the profile. In the left tree locate the pages you want displayed and drag them over the root node of the right tree (called Profile Tabs). Repeat this operation any number of times. You can drag items before, after or as children of other items.

By clicking on items in the Profile Tabs tree (that is the right tree), you can customize each item further by changing the title that will be displayed in menu, adding an alternative text that will be displayed when mouse is over the item and an icon. Note that alternative texts and icons are optional features of skins, so unless a skin supports these features and the theme is configured to use them, these won't have any effect. By default, most of the pre-built themes display alternative texts. Icons, though supported by the majority of skins, are not widely used in pre-built themes. However, you will learn how to create your own themes later.

The last tabs, Permissions, you can define who sees your profile. By default, profile is visible to All Users. You can change that to a list of roles and/or users. In the list on the left, select the roles you want to see your profile. On the left, you can add user by typing in their username. Users you add will appear below in a list, where you can do simple management such as removing them from current profile.

Manage Profiles

As your site grows, you will end up with more and more profiles. Also, you will need to modify existing profiles to match changes you make in the website logic. This is made easy in NavXp with use of profiles. Simply edit a profile and all instances that use it will update automatically.

To manage profiles, open up NavXp configuration screem and go intro the third tab, named Manage Profiles. Here, you will see a list with all profiles that are currently defined on current portal. You can do basic management such as preview, new, edit, delete, etc. Note that this listing is different from the one onInstance Profiles. The main difference is here you can see all profiles, while on Instance Profiles you can only see profiles bound to current instance. Also, you can only delete profiles from this screen.

Manage Instance Profiles

On Instance Profiles tab (that is the first tab that appears when you open NavXp configuration screen), you can manage profiles that are displayed by current instance. The profile table on the page contains all the profiles that are bound to current instance. First time you see this screen, only the default profile should be in the table. In the dropdown at the top of the screen, you should be able to see all the profiles that are NOT bound to the current instance. You can select one and hit the Bind button to make that profile a part of your instance. To unbind, locate the profile you want in the table below and hit the unbind button (represented by an X icon) locate right after its id field.

There are two scenarios you'll be thinking of:

1. You have an instance that needs to display the same profile for everybody that sees it

With other words, you're taking care of restricting permissions from Module Settings. In this case, you will have only one profile bound to the instance.

2. You have an instance that's targeted to multiple roles, and you don't want to end up having one module for each role

In this case, NavXp comes to your rescue. Bind all profiles targeted to different roles to same instance. You do this by repeatedly selecting each profile in the dropdown on Instance Profiles page, and hit Bind button. Then, make sure the order in which they appear is logical. For example, if you have a profile that is targeted towards all users, you probably want it to display in case the rest of the profiles don't match current user's permissions. To reflect this, you will need to decrease its precedence so it appears at the bottom of the list. To accomplish this, locate the decrease precedence button (represented by down arrow icon) next to the profile id, and hit it repeatedly until it gets at the bottom.